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Thursday, July 2, 2015

183. Stoking the Firebrands

The Planetary Consortium's approach to their cold war with the Autonomist Alliance is to treat them like pests. They may never be eliminated entirely, but they can be managed, suppressed, and prevented from doing real damage. To the minds of the PC, the greatest weakness of the autonomists is that the disorder of their sociopolitical systems is only a step away from a breakdown into proper discord, balkanization, and dysfunction.

To this end, PC memeticists have maintained a powerful memetic campaign. Rather than attempt to convince autonomists of the PC's views, moderate them, and draw them towards compromise, the campaign seeks to radicalize all possible ideologies, driving wedges into autonomist communities. These memes are designed to support almost all ideological positions, encouraging stronger and stronger views, or else to make finer and finer distinctions within ideological groups, causing fractures among those who were previously united.Plot Hook: PC memeticists have been carefully raising paranoia among autonomists regarding crypto-facist conspiracies that sound suspiciously like Firewall. Firewall needs a team to perform a raid/hack mission to determine if the memeticists have information on Firewall, and whether this might be an Ozma ploy to attack Firewall.